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The evolution of the service marketing field was marked by the emergence of a global, vigorous and tolerant community of service marketing researchers. This paper seeks to examine the history of the service marketing community and argues that it may be an archetype for building the emergent global service research community.

The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. The authors interviewed four pioneering service scholars and also collected descriptive data (e.g. Authorship, Affiliation, Title, Keywords) of all service related articles published in 13 top peer‐reviewed marketing and service journals over the last 30 years (5,432 articles; 6,450 authors). In a dynamic analysis the authors mapped global collaboration between countries over time and detected clusters of international collaboration.

Findings suggest a growing international collaboration for the USA and the UK, while for other countries like Israel the global collaboration started from a high level and decreases now. Further, the service marketing community never became polarized and there were always contributions from researchers all over the world.

As the global service research community is developing, service marketing becomes a research neighborhood within the broader service research community. Simultaneously, other research neighborhoods are emerging within this new community (e.g. service arts, service management, service engineering, service science).

Anchored on the social evolution and biological evolution metaphors, this study explains the evolution of the service marketing field from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Furthermore, it explains the development of the service marketing community as an archetype for building the global service research community.

Defines transnational strategy as the integration strategy formulation and implementation across all countries in which the company elects to do business, in contrast to a multidomestic (or “multilocal”) approach that provides for independent development and implementation of strategy by management units within each country. Asks how different types of service firms should move from multidomestic strategies, to the creation of a truly transnational strategy. Considers three perspectives: first, the nature of services marketing in a large federal country like the USA; second, the drivers that stimulate the internationalization of an industry and the different ways in which they apply to three broad types of services; and third, how the concept of core and supplementary services can be applied to both standardization and customization of services in a global setting.

Offers a fresh outlook for managing the delicate interaction between the customer and the contact employee in the service environment. Emphasizes that the quality of the customer‐employee interfacehas a great effect on customers′ perceptions of the quality and value of the service, as well as on their satisfaction. Suggests a model of how companies can improve this interface by treating employees ascustomers and customers as employees, thus developing lower cost and higher quality services and also higher levels of satisfaction on the part of both customers and employees. Recommends various steps for management to take.

Illustrates, through both actual and hypothetical examples, the importance to services marketers of recent empirical and theoretical work on decision framing. Suggests that services marketers could have more opportunity than product marketers for affecting the decision frames of consumers. Discusses implications for service marketers, including how decision framing can effect the positioning of service firms in an industry. Considers how the frame can affect the decision of whether or not to purchase, and how changes in the decision frame might encourage consumers to purchase more expensive alternatives.Notes ethical issues raised for marketers by these implications.

Describes how customers potentially influence the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of other customers in many service environments. Explains why service marketers and operations marketers should be aware of the impact of such customer‐to‐customer relations. Examines the issues of customer compatibility and customer behaviour, finding that the classification of compatible and incompatible behaviours is often situation‐specific. Explores how the way customers affect each other can be positively influenced.

Describes how customer satisfaction can be influenced by direct or indirect interaction with other customers in a service facility′s physical environment. Explores how the way customers affect each other can be positively influenced. Describes exploratory research which identified ten roles a service provider can play: Environmental Engineer, Teacher, Rifleman, Cheerleader, Police Officer, Detective, Santa Claus, Matchmaker, Legislator.

Highlights the need for services advertising to receive more attention from marketing practitioners.Adapts a previously‐developed classification scheme of services for advertising. Assesses service characteristics of relevance in advertising. Develops a series of guidelines for managers seeking to develop effective services advertising.

Reviews the findings of a study investigating the adoption of a service innovation and the relative importance to consumers in making the adoption decision. Suggests managerial implications and recommendations as a result of the study. Identifies other service industries to which the implications could be relevant. Includes an appendix describing the methodology of the study.

Argues that all service encounters can be thought of as sharing common elements and common problems. Considers some common issues faced by a variety of personal service providers, maintaining that researchers and managers can understand consumer classification and evaluation of services by comparing functionally dissimilar services. Analyses data from a consumer survey on attitudes to 16different household and personal services. Uses cluster analysis of these services, showing two dimensions, Service Locus and Service Instigation. Examines the relative importance of service attributes across these clusters.

Close inspection of many services reveals them to be multiple services (multi‐services). Many others, such as ski resorts, entertainment centres, motorway service complexes and restaurant/hotel developments, are more obviously of a multi‐service type. The inter‐relationship of the component services of a multi‐service is often closely held by the entrepreneur during the early stages of the venture, and may still be the subject of experimentation. Moving from entrepreneurial to professional management requires definition of these service inter‐relationships. Division of the concept into its components to simplify control, and the use of separate performance maximising incentives are hazardous approaches. The first objective of new control systems should be to replicate the entrepreneurial multi‐concept service. Experimentation should be left until later.